‘Please keep your voice down,’ she hissed. ‘Princess Elva might hear you.’
‘Elva has gone ice skating with Captain Vine,’ said Alarik, in a bored voice. He had spied them that morning from his balcony, talking and laughing as they donned their skates at the edge of the lake. The recent battle was already a distant thought to Vine. Or perhaps his captain had sought out the princess to take her mind off it. They hadn’t lost exactly. But they hadn’t won either.
Everything remained uncomfortably … unfinished.
In any case, Alarik hadn’t so much as flinched when he watched them bend their heads together, Elva turning to plant a stolen kiss on Vine’s cheek. Let them skate. Let them flirt.Let them fall madly in love for all he cared.
‘Trust me, she’s no more in love with me than I am with her.’
‘Time will take care of that,’ said his mother, with infuriating simplicity. ‘For now, your alliance is what matters.’
Frustration burned in the pit of Alarik’s stomach. He went to the window to look out at the whirling snow, trying not to think of the wrangler in his bed. There was no measure of time that would install the princess of Halgard into his heart. Not when it was already filled with someone else.
Another matter that remained frustratingly unfinished.
Not that they had evenbegun.
‘You lost half of King Nilas’s elk at the Blackspires.’ His mother’s voice drifted after him. ‘Almost a third of his soldiers. And your own.’
‘I know that,’ he said, tersely.
‘Queen Regna will strike again, Alarik. It’s only a matter of time.’
‘Iknow,’ he growled.
Butwhere? Andwhen?
Not for the first time that day, he thought of the beast trapped in his mountain. A true dragon, if the old rumours held true. Was Regna goading him to free it? Or did she truly want it for himself? Did she really believe it could be tamed?
With the right wrangler, perhaps.
Which would explain her sudden interest in Greta Iversen.
‘You need this alliance,’ said his mother.
It remained the unavoidable truth. A thorn in his heart that pricked deeper every day. He closed his eyes, imagining a future with Elva. But when he tried to conjure the princess in her lovely gowns and sparkling tiaras, his traitorous thoughts returned to Greta. Soft and beautiful and singing to his beasts. Strong and wild and roaring into battle. Pale and bruised and bleeding in his arms.
Safe and sleeping in his bed.
A hand came to his arm, jolting him from the vision. ‘Alarik. Is there something else going on?’
He turned to his mother, suddenly desperate to lay his struggle at her feet. To unload the burden of his own heart, if just for a moment. But he stilled at the look on her face. It was pale and drawn, worry deepening the lines around her eyes.
She looked tired. Fearful. Old.
Long ago, Alarik had made a promise to the memory of his father that he would keep his mother safe, that he would strive, every day, to make her happy. He had failed, year after year, to keep that promise. He was still failing.
‘I know you do not wish to marry Elva,’ she went on. ‘In truth, I always believed it was Ansel who would make the perfect alliance for this kingdom. Leaving you to live as you like, with your freedom and your beasts.’ Her smile was edged with sadness. ‘The day he sailed to marry his bride in Eana, I stood at my balcony and wept. What kind of mother is too afraid of the sea to attend her own son’s wedding?’
‘The kind that lost her husband to the ocean,’ said Alarik. ‘No one blamed you for not being there.’
Alarik was glad of it now, that her crippling fear of the crossing had kept her from getting on his ship. That she did not have to sit in that pew and witness the sword skewering Ansel’s heart,see the rivers of blood that flowed from his chest, painting his ivory doublet crimson.
She closed her eyes, a sigh sweeping out of her. ‘I still wonder if I could have saved him.’
‘No.’ The word was swift and final. ‘There was nothing you could have done.’
Another failure that was his to bear.
